Delicious Monster — what a great name for a software company — is preparing to release their Delicious Library software. It sounds like it’s basically a desktop version of Media Chest, minus the community aspect; or one of the several server-side library systems that use amazon to extract book data… but the interface looks quite nice. It’s a piece of software that you can use to keep track of all your physical media… books, CDs, DVDs and video games, and to help you keep track of who has them if you tend to loan things out to friends.

delicious_library.jpg

It has some pretty nifty features… it supports scanning bar codes through iSight
or a number of firewire digital camcorders (why not the much more common USB webcams?) or a bluetooth laser barcode scanner that they sell; or you can type by hand. You can sync your data to your ipod’s notes area, grab amazon recommendations based on your entire library (privacy concern, maybe, if you’re really worried about amazon devouring your soul rather than your wallet), drag-and-drop contents into email or IM. You can import data from a number of formats, and it stores its contents in an XML file so you can export it to just about anything. You can rate your items, like you do with itunes, you can search with both text (results narrow down with each keystroke) and voice (speak the title of something and it’s instantly highlighted), and you can create “shelves” — like itunes playlists to manage groupings of your items. It interfaces with the OSX AddressBook application to facilitate checking stuff out to friends; with Amazon and IMDB to help you find more items by that author/musician/director/etc, more information about the actor, etc. And a few other things.

All in all, it looks like a very cool piece of software. Only two problems… first, it’s not out yet… it’s due out November 10th I think.. depends on if their “release in 9 days” is inclusive or not… so who knows if it will live up to their claims…. And second, it’s not free, and they don’t seem to have the price listed anywhere on the site. But if it’s not too pricey, it’d be worth getting if you have an excessive number of books, like I do. And a mac, of course. It’s not available for windows.

Anyone out there know of anything similar for a PC? I know of a few things that can run on the server that’ll do some of this, but no PC desktop clients.

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